Love This

Christmas is definitely my favorite time of year. There's just so much love around. Love of family and friends, love of religious traditions perhaps, and of course, love of food. It's just so heart-warming. And so good for my soul.

Now that Thanksgiving is over, I've allowed myself to get fully into the Christmas spirit, and I'm loving every minute of it-- especially the cooking. Right now I'm just sitting in my chair, enjoying a mug of homemade vegetable soup, chock-full of aromatic vegetables, homemade noodles, black pepper and other great belly-warming spices, and I even threw in some sweet corn I had in the freezer from this summer. Our little 3-foot tree is up and lit, I can see our outside lights gleaming through the window, Christmas music is playing on the stereo, and the dog is curled up at my feet. This is the life, I'm tellin ya.

And there's more in the works! In a couple of weeks I'm planning to give all of my school friends a break from finals and host my own Christmas dinner a little early here at the apartment. I'm going to make a fabulous beef brisket with portabella mushrooms and cranberries, and who knows what else? Enough Christmas cookies to feed an army, probably.

Anyway, that's all for now. Back to enjoying the Christmas-y mood and this awesome soup!

I need to get better at this.

Alright. I'm a blog slacker. I'm sorry. I don't even have a good excuse, haha, just that I'm lazy. But stuff has been going on in my food life, so I will take the time to update now as I watch the Dems fight it out on CNN (I'm liking Dennis Kucinich right now, though he hasn't a prayer of winning).

About a week and a half ago, we held our second Slow Food on Campus meeting. Everyone gathered at my apartment (though they all got lost first trying to find it), and we shared in some delicious food, including red beans and rice made with local garlic, local onion, and organic beans and rice, made by yours truly, some delicious local beef rump roast with dried porcini gravy, spicy vegetable samosas, local salsa, some sweet and spicy winter squash soup, delicious brownies from BLU, and some other great eats. We also had some great conversation, but we are kind of at an impasse when it comes to officially chartering the group. Our parent organization is asking a lot of us (especially in the funds department) that we cannot come up with out of thin air, and that we are not sure we can ask of our group members when they are only making a cursory commitment to us in the first place since we have no established reputation on campus yet. Arrgh, it's frustrating!

Anyway, that's all I have for now. Hopefully I'll have more after the holidaze...